iDrama

Breaking News!!! There’s a new iPhone coming out in June or July. According to Shania Twain, “That don’t impress me much”. Tell us something we don’t know.

By now, anybody who’s interested, and even some who are not, has heard about the apparent misplacing of a 2010 iPhone in a bar in Northern California. Looks like some Apple employee who was entrusted with this (cue fancy sci-fi music) highly classified piece of cutting edge technology, went to some bar and left it there. Yes folks, he “left” it there. All the articles we read about this incident use that word……left. Personally, I’m leaning more to using the word “planted” instead of left, but that’s just me; I used to be an auditor, so I’m programmed to employ a certain level of “professional skepticism” in all situations (or as a friend of mine back home would say ‘ I doh truss dem boy an dem nah”). That is, of course, if you buy the whole idea that the “found” hardware is genuine in the first place.

I personally think it is genuine, and this whole drama surrounding the thing seems very scripted. First of all, this is probably the first time anyone has been able to get their hands on an actual prototype before Apple wanted them to……(hmmmm……..unless Apple wanted them to). Now I would expect that the company would impress upon its employees the importance of safeguarding any new technologies or products that have not yet been released, In light of that, the idea that some 27 year old software engineer, left this very important piece of equipment on some random bar stool is a little too hard to swallow.

Then get this, the guy who finds the phone, takes it home with him planning to locate the owner next day (such a kind soul). He wakes up next morning to find that it was apparently dead (the plot thickens). At this point he finds the phone looks kinda weird, so he decides to poke around and opens it (who does that?). Well apparently, this random guy who found the phone was savvy enough to open the phone (I guess he stopped planning on returning it at this point), and to his utter amazement and wonder, he suddenly realized what he had stumbled upon.

I imagine the conversation in his head went something like this …”Oh ho…what have we here, this must be the brand new 2010 iPhone that was left on the bar stool right next to me. I must immediately call Apple to see what they have to say about this”. Apparently Apple wasn’t too interested in saying ANYTHING about it. To cut a long story short it seems like the good samaritan felt that the best way to cut his losses (what losses?) was to sell the device to Gizmodo for 5 grand.

Gizmodo apparently did not believe it was real (they must have a lot of spending money), until (cue dramatic music) they get a letter from Apple asking for their phone back….. please…..hmmm. For a company that does not usually say a lot, they sure said a lot.

My take on this is that Apple wanted to create a little additional buzz over the latest iteration of their best selling product. After all, everybody pretty much has their launch cycle committed to memory by now (around June or July isn’t really that hard to remember) so there really was no need to come out and say it……..unless of course the intent here is to distract people from the early warning signs that maybe the latest revolution in mobile computing, the big game changer, the iPad, may not be doing as well as initially expected (oops….did I say that?). What better way to replace the short lived hype over the iPad than with more hype over the iPhone.

Hey, I’m just saying. It just seems to me that this is a little too convenient. But who knows, maybe all of this is real, maybe the 27 year old software engineer really just had one drink too many, and left his not-yet-released iPhone on a bar stool next to a guy who would really want to give it back to him, but changes his mind and opens it up, gets all suspicious, and calls Apple, then gets upset because they were not taking him seriously, so he sells the phone to Gizmodo, who, even though they thought it was fake, paid $5000 for it , opens it up and proclaims it as the real deal, then Apple sends a letter asking for it back (breathe)………please. Come on…it could happen.